Daily Times

Now that the Corona Virus has infected the president, three Republican senators (at this writing) and a number of other officials, American politics may not have been so disrupted since Confederates fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina starting the Civil War in 1861. It is still far too early to know how seriously ill the president is and who else may be infected.

Conflicting reports over the president’s condition raise profound questions as to the extent and seriousness of his illness. Immediately after the announcement of the president testing positive for Corona, the Internet, Twitter and social media erupted challenging its veracity. Given the president’s constant avoidance of truth and fact, twenty-five thousand times or so according to Washington Post fact checkers, can this White House be trusted to disclose the president’s real condition?

Yet, the outlines for several possible outcomes are already visible.

For the president, and all wish him, the First Lady and those infected a speedy recovery, he can prove largely asymptomatic and return to full duty after testing negative. Once virus-free, he could use this exposure as the reason for transforming how the administration treats the disease requiring not only masks and social distancing but producing an overall strategy for containing, mitigating and preventing the further spread. And he would have to admit that his administration did not rate an “A.”

A worse case for the president and the nation is if he contracts more serious and life threatening symptoms such as befell British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and were incapacitated for a significant time

Since the president is not known for any hint of a Damascus-like conversion, it is far more likely that he will double down arguing that the Corona Virus has been exaggerated in its morbidity; that the more than 200 hundred thousand dead are “fake”news; and that he was right all along in dismissing the danger posed by the pandemic arguing, “I survived with minimum or no symptoms. So will you.”

His incredibly irresponsible decision for a Sunday “drive-by” outside Walter Reed National Medical Center putting his security detail and others at risk may be the first of his double down tactics.

A worse case for the president and the nation is if he contracts more serious and life threatening symptoms such as befell British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and were incapacitated for a significant time. Then, the election could be thrown into turmoil. The media has already raised many of the questions that would follow especially since mail-in voting has been long underway.

Most of the “what ifs” are unanswerable now. What if the president were incapacitated and hospitalized for weeks as Boris Johnson was or longer; what if there were severe after effects; when would the vice president be empowered to become acting president and under what circumstances; what if the president were to die, would the party nominate the vice president to replace him; and what if an international crisis broke out, would questions arise about who was in charge as happened after President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981?

These consequences extend to the Congress and to the Senate hearings to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett as a Supreme Court Justice. The current Senate balance is a 53-47 Republican majority. The Senate requires an in-person floor vote. So far, three Republican senators have tested positive for the virus reducing the majority to 50-47. And suppose two or more Republican senators chose to hold the vote post election. That would give Democrats a 49-48 advantage.

While it would be poetic justice for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, facing a defeat, to reverse course and not persist in ramming a vote through the Senate before the election, would he? And Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and his Democratic colleagues no doubt would seize the opportunity and demand an immediate vote on the judge. Hypocrisy would run rampant not that that ever made a difference.

Last week’s column speculated about a January nightmare when no president or vice president was elected by the electoral College or the House of Representatives and the 1947 Presidential Succession Act challenged on the basis that the next in line Speaker of the House was not an “officer” of the Executive Branch specified in the Constitution and thus ineligible. Would or would not the Secretary of State become acting president? No clear answer is present.

In “normal times,” good reasons exist as to withhold certain information about a president’s health so that adversaries will not exploit it. Yet, given the falsehoods and outright distortions that have accompanied the president’s forty-seven months in office, what can be trusted and what cannot be?

Elsewhere I have argued that the Constitution is at grave risk because checks and balances, the basic foundations for government, have become unchecked and unbalanced. Tragically perhaps, Corona/Covid-19 could make these imbalances even worse.

Dr Harlan Ullman is Senior Advisor at the Atlantic Council. His next book is The Fifth Horseman: To Be Feared, Friended or Fought in a MAD-Driven Age